Assassins, review: did Kim Jong-un have his brother murdered in screwball style?

• Dir: Ryan White. 12 cert, 104 mins

The night before she caused the death of Kim Jong-un’s older half-brother, Siti Aisyah celebrated her 25th birthday at the Hard Rock Café in Kuala Lumpur. In the absorbing true-crime documentary Assassins, she’s seen on a Facebook video, smiling and blowing out a candle, looking for all the world like her friend’s description – a “happy-go-lucky” young woman from a tiny village in Indonesia, out for a good time. It’s a hard image to square with the charge of premeditated killing that Malaysian authorities would soon stamp upon her.

The essential mystery posed here has an instant fascination. What could possibly have motivated Siti and her apparent accomplice, 28-year-old Duan Thi Huong from Vietnam, to kill 45-year-old Kim Jong-nam with a nerve agent at Kuala Lumpur’s airport the following day?

The trio collided on February 13, 2017, at about 9am, while Kim was heading for a self-check-in kiosk before his 10.50am flight to Macau. Moments after the two young women jumped him from behind and rubbed their hands over his face, Kim reported the incident to airport security, who escorted him to get medical help. Within an hour, he was dead, the victim of a VX nerve agent related to the Novichok used in 2018’s Salisbury poisonings.

Security footage shows the two women sneaking up to Kim one at a time, running off swiftly afterwards, and heading separately to the bathroom, while seeming to keep their hands well away from any other part of their body. This behaviour alone was enough for the chief investigating officer to secure them behind bars, where they awaited trial for the better part of two years.

What was totally missing was any semblance of motive. For this, Ryan White’s film looks to a conspiracy emanating from within North Korea itself, at the paranoid behest of its commander-in-chief. For years, Kim Jong-nam had been the preferred heir of his father, Kim Jong-il. Then he fell into disfavour, a turn of events that can be traced back to an embarrassing international incident in 2001. Kim Jong-nam had attempted to take his family on holiday to Tokyo Disneyland, using a badly forged passport with a Chinese alias. He was arrested by Japanese police, detained for questioning, and eventually deported to China.

This, the film argues, was almost all that Kim Jong-un’s mother needed to install her own son at the top of the pecking order, and eventually, after Kim Jong-il’s death, have him declared Supreme Leader in 2011, at the age of just 25. Bad blood between the half-brothers, and frequent criticisms made by Kim Jong-nam in interviews, led to numerous attempts on his life. He fled to Macau, then Singapore, and sent a letter to Kim Jong-un begging for mercy in 2012.

In playing the game of connect-the-dots between this widely-suspected hit and the role of two unwitting pawns – Siti and Duan – White’s workmanlike film has a detective story’s narrative spine and positively flies by. Thanks to testimony from journalists and the young women’s lawyers, a defence emerges that’s as strangely plausible as it is outlandish. They were duped, it is claimed, by rogue agents working for North Korean intelligence, who were posing as recruitment guys for a Japanese film company specialising in prank videos.

That hands-on-the-face gag was tested out with body lotion, not VX, on many other unwitting victims before they got to Kim. Siti and Duan were paid handsomely, and hoped these routines might be a first leg-up to some kind of internet stardom. But practice made perfect. Texts from the company’s “producers” criticised their technique – “rub it over more thoroughly”, they would say. And so they would try.

Siti and Duan’s story is an extraordinary snapshot of 15-minute celebrity innocently craved, and then accidentally achieved for all the wrong reasons. Although the film doesn’t make this comparison, it freakishly mirrors the plot of Chicago (2002), sending these flummoxed killers out blinking into flashbulbs on the courthouse steps, na?vely hoping fame and fortune might finally be theirs. As a step-by-step guide to the saga, White’s account grips efficiently without sitting back for a final analysis – but it’s enough.

On Amazon Prime Video from tomorrow